The Wind Whales Of Ishmael - Philip Jose Farmer

 THE WIND WHALES OF ISHMAEL -

PHILIP JOSE FARMER

One minute you're in one of the greatest books ever written chasing a whale named Moby Dick in which the author of that book, Herman Melville, has called the obsessed captain of the ship you're on Ahab and given you the name Ishmael.

'Call me Ishmael,' you're quoted as saying at the start of the book.

The next minute, the ship you're sailing on has been destroyed by Moby Dick and Ahab has been tangled up in a harpoon line and dragged away by the stricken whale. You're the only survivor but by some miracle the empty coffin that had been built for one of your shipmates but never used has bobbed up from under the surface of the sea and you're clinging to it for dear life. 

For a day and a night you float upon the coffin-buoy before being rescued by another whaling ship. You're taken on board and to earn your keep on this new ship you're told to keep watch up on one of he masts and it's there you begin to wonder if the events that have led you to being rescued from a watery grave have caused disorders of your brain?

First there are the St Elmo's fires that you spy before the sea turns into a writhing mass of black tentacles. Next there is sudden and total silence as all becomes strangeness and horror. Night is replaced by day and suddenly the ship you're on is falling through air. The sea has vanished and you're being catapulted through miles of atmosphere to finally crash-land into another sea but one that is deader than the Dead Sea of Palestine or the Great Salt Lake of Utah. 

There you float only to be saved once again by the reappearance of the same coffin-buoy that you once again cling to. The sea's slight current carries you to a shoreline and it's there that you try to understand what has happened and where you are.

You're on a jungle island where vines attach themselves to you and gently, almost lovingly suck your blood. Where under a blood red sun the sky is inhabited by colossal whales that feed on huge clouds of red brit who in turn are hunted not only by flying sharks but by wonderfully strange whaling boats that cruise through the air.

Time has evaporated and whether you're still on Earth or on some distant star, whether you've somehow been flung into the far future or if you're in the throes of a fever dream - it matters not. You're here and that's all there is to it.

The Wind Whales Of Ishmael by Philip Jose Farmer is a leap of imagination on a par with William Burroughs at his drug-fueled best. At times it's particularly reminiscent of Cities Of The Red Night by Burroughs, especially in regard to the boy pirates falling through time. On top of this, Farmer's book is really well-written, so much so that as you're reading it, it's a joy to re-read some of the sentences he composes. The major if not fatal flaw in it, however, is that Farmer veers off the rails half-way through and we end up in a jumble of a Robert E Howard's Conan The Barbarian adventure and Jason And The Argonauts complete with Ray Harryhausen stop-motion film effects.

It's a shame because this abrupt shift of tone and story-line alters the book irrevocably and reduces it to pulp fiction of the swashbuckling kind lacking any kind of substance. All is not lost though in the fact that the first half leaves you with a taste of something quite special going on with Farmer's style of writing and imagination unbound, leaving you wanting to explore more of his canon to see what else he's done.

John Serpico